Hormel chairman Jeffrey Ettinger said that in the US, peanut butter was the second-most popular sandwich ingredient after ham, and added that Skippy would help Hormel "to grow our branded presence in the centre of the store with a non-meat protein product".

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Medtronic, in a project with Yale that I lead, preceded the GSK move by sharing data on an important product, bone morphogenic protein-2, which has revenues approaching a billion dollars.

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After tethering the first two proteins in the pathway to the chip, the researchers found that both did well in breaking down glucose and handing the end-product to the next protein.

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But as Matthew Herper observed back in June, Medtronic has received something of a black eye this year in connection with its promotion of a key product, recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2, (rhBMP-2) which is designed to speed healthy bone growth and fusion in patients with back pain.

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